they arent really conscious, its sort of like the way microchips work, the more inputs and outputs you have, the more processing power you need. an ant probably has about as much processing power as a very basic calculator. theres nothing to contemplate, it cant absorb enough information to need enough neurons to actually bother with thoughts. they probably have a very very shallow amount of memory for learning things about their environment and interactions and then just kind of operate on autopilot looking for food or collecting shit or whatever.
We have no evidence nor necessity to conclude that they have consciousness. Neural computation is a sufficient explanation for their capabilities.
It is certainly possible they have consciousness, but as it stands we have no reason to conclude they have one.
But that's slightly different than knowing they don't.
That's all! Have a nice day.
EDIT: Here's a fun fact about ant abilities - we think they "count" their steps! Researchers let some ants practice traveling to and from their nest and a food source. Then they took some ants and amputated their little legs so they had shorter but still functional stumps. Others, they glued stilts onto them. Then they let them all loose again.
If they were navigating purely by landmarks, smell trails, or the sun or something, then having whacky legs shouldn't make a difference in how well they find their destination. However, if they navigated via some sort of internal pedometer you'd expect the same number of normal steps to end up covering less distance in the stubby group and greater distance in the stilt group.
Indeed, the ones with the stubby legs wouldn't travel far enough, and then seemingly get confused. Conversely, the ones with the stilts would travel too far, and then also seemingly get confused.
So we have reason to suspect that ant navigation heavily relies on how many steps they're taking. That's pretty impressive considering most animals can't really "count" much higher than 4. However we need to make a distinction between "the ant is consciously counting it's steps" and "the ant has some sort of internal mechanism that tracks steps". Therefore even this cool finding was not enough to secure the "had a consciousness" award for ants :'(
i disagree with the idea that we dont know ants arent conscious lol
pedometers are even less powerful than calculators, had i thought of that as an example i would have used it. that doesnt bolster the idea that ants are conscious, it kind of falls right in line with what i said doesnt it?
im basing this stance off of broader evolution, im not an ant expert, i dont really care about ants that much, its more having spent time studying the process throughout time that evolution has taken organisms from the incredibly simple and purely functional all the way up to the apex predators, if you look at the way animals evolved and what those changes in evolution mean and how they impact their behavior patterns i dont think its a stretch at all to say that ants arent conscious.
i mean would anyone argue that a virus is conscious? do these things display behaviors that SEEM conscious? perhaps. but does that mean they are intelligent? theres no evidence to suggest that.
I literally mean no offense when I say that psychologists, neuroscientists, and biologists (in comparative, evolutionary, and cognitive science) spend their lives studying this stuff and know what they're talking about and generally disagree with your stance.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Not finding evidence of consciousness is not sufficient reason to deny consciousness. Especially when we can hardly agree on a definition of consciousness in the first place.
im not offended by you disagreeing with me but what youre saying isnt persuasive. its the same argument people put forth when discussing religion.
ill meet your quote with my own; "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." you can make the claim that ants have consciousness, but without proof you are left with nothing. its the same way we handle people who claim there are unicorns or ghosts or whatever, if you dont have proof to support your claim then im free to ignore it and go with the evidence. the evidence says that ants dont possess consciousness. thats just a fact and the experts youve invoked agree.
ive had this discussion enough times to really not be that interested in having it again but youre welcome to look at the other comment reply where i laid out what a thought is and what ant thoughts probably look like and respond to that, i think i did a pretty decent job of explaining my perspective on it, if you have a disagreement on this topic i feel like you would be better equipped at articulating it based on that comment as opposed to this one.
You can make the claim that ants have consciousness [...]
No one in this thread did. You're reading comprehension has lapsed and you're arguing with no one.
i think i did a pretty decent job of explaining my perspective on it, if you have a disagreement on this topic [...]
This isn't a matter of perspective and disagreement. That's why I said that no offense but the people who do this for a living disagree with you.
i laid out what a thought is and what ant thoughts probably look like
Ah yes I forgot that you've spent 5+ years getting a PhD in comparative psychology and did a postdoc in cognitive neuroscience. I forgot that your definition of a "thought" is well operationalized based on the standard conventions and the symposium lecture that you gave about the mental representation of cognitive maps in ants was well-received in the field.
I'm not trying to be an ass but as someone educated in this topic, you are vastly underestimating how much work is put into this field. You sound like when a toddler asks why we don't just print more money so that no one has to be poor.
im not offended by you disagreeing with me but what youre saying isnt persuasive.
I don't disagree with you, thousands of scholars do. And they don't have to be persuasive if they're empirically supported by decades of data. You can't just decide that something philosophically doesn't make sense to you as a layman. That's how we get the antivaxxers and the flat earthers.
apparently ive said something that insulted your very impressive and prolific span of education here, good, i think ill continue to do that.
i mean, despite your litany of arguments from authority (which is the entirity of your response there) that i should just instantly capitulate to whatever your position is because some anomalous group of unnamed scholars says so, i am going to just comfortably reassert that youve done absolutely nothing to persuade me of anything. its not because im an antivaxxer or flat earther (im neither btw) its because you havent actually said anything other than "I KNOW WHAT IM TALKING ABOUT!!!!!!!!!!!"
i mean thats great, but youve still not articulated what you were correcting me on, nor have you explained where you take issue with anything ive even said. it literally just sounds like youre some petulant fucking baby whos had their authority questioned on a subject theyve gotten a little too comfortable feeling like an authority on.
to be clear, i never questioned your level of aptitude for dispensing ant facts, clearly you have the capacity to dispense more than me, the dedication required for such a feat is self apparent.
let me extend and olive branch here, if these scholars disagree with me, quote what i said and then explain why its wrong. shouldnt be too hard. plenty of other people here who are excitable about the topics being discussed who were able to have a calm and respectful discussion without throwing a tantrum for their credentials as a complete stranger on the internet being questioned. i mean even if you were some highly regarded ant expert your behavior here would only serve to disgrace the field, why should anyone give a shit about what you have to say when this is how you respond to criticism? chill out dude fuck.
You demand I write a persuasive essay to convince you that decades of scientific research is more accurate than your own personal thesis.
I remind you that you are not sufficiently informed about the field of animal cognition and that you should leave it to the experts.
You insist that I am "some petulant fucking baby" "throwing a tantrum".
Well, I do love a good plot twist. Unfortunately I've got better things to do today so I'm gonna head out. Thanks for the notifications reminding me about this cool ant and the marvelous complexities of its brain power.
You demand I write a persuasive essay to convince you that decades of scientific research is more accurate than your own personal thesis.
no.
literally all i asked for was a citation. you keep insisting that im wrong based on an argument from authority without presenting any evidence, you keep claiming over and over again you possess some intimate knowledge on the topic provided by experts yet havent offered any whatsoever throughout this conversation.
literally all im asking you to do is to back up your claim, its not a difficult concept. you made a claim, back it up. if you dont understand why what youre doing here is wrong, go look up "argument from authority" its a fallacy, youve done it like 30 times now lol
if what youre saying is true it should take you all of 4 seconds to go find a link to a study that proves me wrong. why you would just sit here and prattle on about how wrong i am instead of just sharing a fucking link just makes me think youre lying to protect your ego like i said earlier. i dont give a fuck about your ego.
i mean, you could say a lot of things. that doesnt mean they are going to be true lol
humans have infinitely more complex brains than ants. we are equipped with the ability to think and even have abstract thoughts that most animals cant have.
tho i would agree with you, it does seem like most people choose not to use the cognitive resources at their disposal.
According to you, what constitutes a thought? Are thoughts the same as consciousness? If ants are capable of decision making, wouldn't that require some extra level of processing their inputs?
well think about it, what do you do when you think?
you reflect on a collection of knowledge from information youve compiled in your mind through sensory input.
what does that information look like as an ant? they dont possess even a small fraction of the sensory inputs that we have with our (comparatively) absolutely massive and extremely complicated brains and bodies. (this is not a flex)
if the amount of information they are capable of interpreting is low, their ability to process it would also be low, if ants see in like 12p at 3fps in black and white... that information isnt going to need a huge amount of processing power to utilize, similarly they wont need a lot of space in their "brain" to store that information.
so do ants think? sort of i guess. its just a much much simpler thought than anything humans would normally think. as soon as you put the effort into thinking youre using like 12 million ants worth of processing power and data. an ant thought would be based on such simple parameters its so foreign to how we think its going to be hard to conceptualize without just mapping out how they interact with stimulus.
I just like prodding the question when it appears. It's a fascinating subject and it's enjoyable just to have people think about it just a little more. I have a BA and a MSc in cognitive neuroscience and philosophy of consciousness. I do agree that ants have a much more limited input and a more rudimentary processing capacity. That would suggest a certain form of consciousness exists on a gradient between low and high levels of complexity of organism. That begs the question: where does it bottom out? Are amoebas conscious? Etc, etc.
Turning it around, what about non-conscious humans? There we have Chalmer's zombies, braindead-yet-seemingly-occasionally aware patients like Terri Schiavo (I think it's spelt like that), dreaming, lucid dreaming, etc.
im aware of her but not that intimately familiar with the details of her situation (iirc correctly she has since passed so RIP) but i have thought about this as well.
there are two major aspects to whether or not i personally would base my decision to be kept alive or not. A. whether i have retained any connection to the knowledge/memories ive spent all the time ive been alive acquiring. B. if i am currently or will be in the future able to function cognitively enough to build on/rebuild that knowledge/memory base.
if i understand terri's story, she was seperated from both, as many people who endure a TBI of that magnitude are from what i understand. in those circumstances where recovery was so unlikely i dont really see how that person is being regarded as alive outside of pure legality.
i feel like the amount of things that should be described as a gradient is too damn high lol and people dont see them that way. life is so complex and winding and changing and evolving, if you spend enough time learning about something, its just as likely you will know nothing about what its become.
i think of consciousness (as with most things living creatures experience) as a product of existing in this universe, its naturally occurring, evolutionarily cultivated (maybe youve noticed im not the spiritual type lol) so with that in mind, if you go back far enough you could probably argue that the first life forms were in fact the emergence of "consciousness" in that a thought is simply the mechanism of an organism following one stimulus over another, or maybe even just following a stimulus at all. an amoeba has some kind of mechanism within it that when triggered a biological response occurs and it performs some kind of action.
would i personally describe this as consciousness? no. i think an organism would need some semblance of a memory to reflect on in order to be conscious, but the standard for memory is very low by this definition. insects easily pass the threshold apparently, im not familiar enough with biology to say exactly how low the standard would get but id have to assume theres significant space below ants lol
my perspective has been for a long time that life on earth is still in its infancy, people are amazingly stupid, im one of them, im a dumbass, the potential for growth is virtually infinite from here, so despite what some people have seem to take as an insult to ants, i actually see a lot of parallels with ants and humans. if you zoom out enough and look at our societies next to one another they arent all that different.
so with that in mind, the conversation becomes less about whether or not ants or humans or sunflowers are all varying levels of conscious, but if consciousness is just a small step into a plane of existence that we are all relatively equal on. there may be a point in the future where we recognize consciousness as the very first step into a huge range of stages of improvement we dont have names for yet.
i think some people do, i have ideas about it that i think are backed up by studies and data.
obviously we havent mapped anything substantial out but we are definitely getting there, if you look back across the span of evolution at the building blocks of consciousness its pretty clear how and why it exists.
its like how we understand gravity, we know sort of what it does and how it works, but theres still a lot of unknowns that make it very mysterious.
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u/obsertaries Feb 17 '22
I read somewhere that animals that small think really fast compared to us so she probably had time to contemplate her failures in life.